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SPEAKER_03: Football season is back, and Whole Foods Market has everything you need to host a successful watch party or tailgate on game day. In the meat department, there's animal welfare-certified marinated chicken wings, organic chicken sausages, hot dogs, and more. And you can grab football-ready sides in a flash. Everything from mac and cheese and potato salad to sushi. I love picking up Whole Foods guacamole, which if you haven't eaten it, you're about to get your mind blown because it's actually amazing. By the way, catering from Whole Foods makes tailgates a breeze. Explore the menu at shop.wfm.com. Save 20% from September 20th through October 17th with promo code FALLCATERING, all one word. Don't sleep on the build-your-own-taco bar. It's always a winner. Terms apply. Elevate game day at Whole Foods Market. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. If you're a small business owner, it isn't just your business. It's your life. Whatever your business might be, you want someone who understands. And that's where State Farm Small Business Insurance comes in. State Farm agents are small business owners too, and know what it takes to help you personalize your policies for your small business needs. Like a good neighbor? State Farm is there. Talk to your local agent today. Hey, it's Guy here, and before we get to the show, you know that feeling when you think back to some of your early work and you cringe? Well, I recently spoke with Tom Hanks, and he told me he gets that feeling too. He can't even watch his own movies. And for a man widely known as the nicest person in Hollywood, Tom Hanks also struggles with what it means to be authentic. Check out our conversation on my other podcast, The Great Creators. Just search for The Great Creators with Guy Raz wherever you listen to podcasts. And now for today's show, another great conversation with a creator and a builder, one of the most successful in Hollywood. It's from 2021, and I think you're going to love this one.
SPEAKER_01: Any filmmaker that's in the screening of their films, not watching the film, they're watching the audience. Yeah. So you're watching the backs of heads. I've become really good at watching the backs of heads. Like I can tell what you're feeling by your neck at this point. And for the first time being in the back of a theater, watching just the side view of the light of the screen hit people's faces as they smile, as they nod, as they cry, whatever. That feeling just, you know, it was my first hit and I was addicted and I've been addicted ever since.
SPEAKER_03: Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz and on the show today, how Ava DuVernay took her skills as a publicist, writer, director, and entrepreneur, and built a movement that's changing how movies are made and who gets to make them. When it comes to thinking about who is an entrepreneur, we often overlook people who get their start in the creative arts. I mean, think about Walt Disney. Before he built what would become one of the biggest media companies in history, he created the most iconic cartoon character in history. But for his time, he was pretty unusual. Artists usually make their money by selling their art, their acting skills, their paintings, their music, their novels. But over the past decade, more and more creative types have started to take more control over how their work is used and in some cases, to own and distribute and market their own work. This is how Ava DuVernay has constructed her entire career. She's not only one of the most entrepreneurial creators in Hollywood, but increasingly one of the most influential. Now, you might think of Ava as a director. Her documentary 13th, about mass incarceration in the United States, was nominated for an Academy Award. And her drama When They See Us, based on an assault in Central Park and the wrongful conviction of black and Latino teenagers, made a huge impact when it was released in 2019. Ava has directed big budget films like A Wrinkle in Time and historical dramas like Selma. But her directing business is only one part of a much bigger enterprise. Even a movement that Ava DuVernay has built from the ground up. She began her career as a publicist and at age 27, started her own publicity agency. She's self-financed her first films and because she had a background in marketing and knew how to network, she was able to build her own distribution company. Today, Ava oversees a campus just outside downtown LA that encompasses much of her work. Array is a production company, a distributor of films, a nonprofit education center, a community event space, and a resource center to help people of color get into the film industry. Ava fell in love with the arts at an early age. For the first years of her life, she grew up in Compton, California, and then moved to the nearby neighborhood of Linwood. And one of the most important people in her life was her Aunt Denise.
SPEAKER_01: She was a frustrated artist who loved music and fine art and movies and didn't grow up in a time or in an environment that encouraged or celebrated those interests in her. So she became a nurse following in her mother's footsteps, but always fostered her love of art as just a lover of it, just a fan, and really exposed me to all kinds of things that I would not have, I don't believe I would have come across if it hadn't been for her.
SPEAKER_03: And it sounds like, and we'll talk about this later, but it sounds like you particularly had a strong bond with her.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. I mean, there were three of them who raised us. It was my mother, her mother, my grandmother, and her sister, my aunt, were just a big, big part of our lives. And my two sisters came right after me. So this is a lot of ladies, a lot of that energy. And I would go to my aunt's after school, and I just spent a lot of time with her. So it was as close to her as I was to my mother, but they had very different interests. My mother's interests were my education and the clothes on my back and the food on my plate, and just trying to keep it all going. And my aunt, who was single, her interests were art and fun and kind of the things that
SPEAKER_01: my mother was so busy and focused on taking care of us, didn't really have the space, the mental space for. And so they made a good team. I guess when you were a little girl, maybe eight or nine years old, a man named Murray
SPEAKER_03: May came into your life. Your mom married him, and he would become a hugely important influence on you as a kid and then as a grownup, right?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, my dad. I remember the first day that he came to pick her up for a date and opened the door. I don't think I've ever told this story. I opened the door, and he was just so handsome. And he had on a starched white shirt, button up and slacks and belt and shiny shoes. And I just really liked him from there. He was such a gentleman and so kind to me and continued to be that to me all of his life, for the rest of his life. So he had a big effect on me.
SPEAKER_03: He was an entrepreneur. He had his own business, right?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I love you calling him an entrepreneur because I think that we don't use that word for people who are not creating companies that are fancy, so to speak. But he owned his own business, a small carpet and flooring company. And yeah, he had about, I don't know, six or seven men who worked with him. But he would get down on his hands and knees and put in carpet and flooring for residences and commercial spaces in Los Angeles.
SPEAKER_03: When you were a teenager and people would meet you and they would say, oh, Ava, she's going to be this or that, what would people say about you? They would say, oh, she's going to be the president. What do you remember people saying?
SPEAKER_01: I always got that I was bright, that I was smart, the things that every kid should hear, right? Just that I had potential and I could be anything that I wanted to be at the time for many, many years when I was young when people would ask that horrible question that you asked children, which I don't think children should be asked, what do you want to be when you grow up? I'd say a lawyer. And I would always hear, you know, positive reinforcement. Oh, I can see that for you or that's perfect or you're going to be that.
SPEAKER_01: I remember my godmother Charlene gave me a briefcase for my eighth grade graduation. And I thought, right, these are the tools that I need to go into the courtroom. And I am truly a few short steps from the courtroom. This will not take long. I am that smart. And I will use this briefcase and I will go to the Supreme Court and do whatever I need to do.
SPEAKER_03: Was there anything in your childhood or teenage years that would in any way you could look at and say, yeah, I was going to be a filmmaker?
SPEAKER_01: No. Other than loving movies.
SPEAKER_03: What movies did you love as a kid?
SPEAKER_01: Anything that they played at the Lakewood Mall. That's the only place that I went to see movies with my aunt Denise, who would take me after school to the Lakewood Mall. I should go there and see a movie one day. That would probably bring back such emotional, so much emotion. But yeah, anything. So this is the late 70s, early 80s. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: So everything from, I don't know, like ET to action movies to just whatever was playing.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, all that kind of stuff. Very few black people, I remember. But just a bunch of studio stuff with different views of white life.
SPEAKER_01: And I really enjoyed it. And then as I got into, I mean, I enjoyed movies. And so as I got into high school, I remember loving the John Hughes stuff and wondering if there was any black people at the school. Yeah. I remember seeing the film that I really liked. I think it was Sixteen Candles. I remember I saw the one Asian character.
SPEAKER_01: I really thought, oh, that's not nice. I remember thinking that. Everyone was laughing. And I remember thinking that that's not nice. But just generally consuming the movies as a young person would and at some point in there being aware that I wasn't seeing films with black folk in it.
SPEAKER_03: What was the first film you saw where you saw black characters and actors on screen that you were very conscious of it?
SPEAKER_01: The first film I saw that where I saw people of color on screen that was very formative for me was West Side Story. Come to find out years later, half of them were not brown. But you couldn't tell me that Bernardo was not straight from Puerto Rico at the time. Like it was that, that film was such a big deal for me that it was a while to shake off and realize that it was the magic of movies that made me see what I was seeing and feel what I was feeling. But that was the first film where I saw people like the folks in my neighborhood because I went to school with a lot of Latino and Filipinx people. And so I remember loving the colors and the culture. Oddly the first film with black people I can remember seeing and really, and I know it's not the case. I know I'd seen other ones. But for whatever reason, the one that I really remember feeling deeply was Not Until I Got to College, which was Mo' Better Blues, Spike Lee's Mo' Better Blues. I know I'd seen the other films before then. And I'd seen all kinds of other films, Lady Seen the Blues, other things. But the one that really had an effect was Mo' Better Blues.
SPEAKER_05:
SPEAKER_03: You went to UCLA and you majored in African American studies and English. And you wrote for the Black Student newspaper there. What did you make of UCLA? You were there in the early 90s. Did you like it?
SPEAKER_01: I loved it. I had a beautiful experience there. Learned a lot, was involved with the Black Student Union, learned about the power of protest, learned about communities of color in Los Angeles that hadn't been engaged with because I think people who aren't from LA think it's all together, but it's really quite a sprawl.
SPEAKER_01: So if you're from Compton, Long Beach, Linwood, you really have no reason to be in LA proper unless... I had no reason to be in LA, so I really wasn't familiar with LA proper until I got to college. And it's like 40 minutes up the coast, but it felt like a different world. And so, yeah, just had a dorm experience, lived in the dorms for the first couple of years, worked my little job as a waitress, came home with my tips, going through to the games. It was a very normal college experience, except for the fact that there was a huge, huge racial unrest happening in the city at that time. So feeling... Being a college student and becoming conscious of my history and the historical context of the times that we were in really had a big effect on me.
SPEAKER_03: You were there, you were a student at UCLA when the footage of Rodney King beating came out and then also the acquittal of those police officers in the aftermath of that. Do you remember that time? Do you remember... What do you remember about that time when you were a student?
SPEAKER_01: I remember being enraged. I remember that the Rodney King assault was won in a steady litany of assaults on the black community at that time. And so it was just a very oppressive LAPD presence in black communities and in spaces where black people convened all around the city that was deeply felt and became quite combustible when really the first video footage of a police assault that reached national prominence was still not enough to result in any kind of punishment for the officers who were involved.
SPEAKER_03: Do you remember when you were a teenager, would you just see police cars driving around your neighborhood? Do you remember seeing police presence all the time?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, all the time.
SPEAKER_03: And it was just part of the background. That was just there all the time.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's interesting even to get the question because it makes me think at my age, oh right, that's not normal for people who don't live in those communities. But yeah, police are everywhere and they're overhead as well. We call it the ghetto bird. It's a helicopter that flies low across black and brown communities in Los Angeles, especially was one of the tactics of the LAPD.
SPEAKER_03: I guess when you were in college, you started to get into performing, like performing in a hip hop duo called Figures of Speech. How did that happen? Yeah, I was down in the Leimert Park area, this glorious black arts district in Los Angeles
SPEAKER_01: and became a part of the arts and culture space there and just a young person who was very attracted to hip hop and all the disciplines within hip hop.
SPEAKER_03: By the way, what were you listening to?
SPEAKER_01: Anything that was late 80s, early 90s. So everything from Tribe Called Quest to Public Enemy to Far Side, Freestyle Fellowship, all kinds, everything that was at that time.
SPEAKER_03: How did you start to perform yourself?
SPEAKER_01: I was going to this open mic night, just enjoying it. This was the place to be. It was a place called The Good Life. It was a health food store that on Thursday nights would open a mic and people would perform. And it was all hip hop, all rhyming. You'd come with your tape, you'd press play on your tape and you would have like two minutes to rhyme and impress the crowd. And so on Thursday nights you would listen to a colorful cast of local MCs who were known in the neighborhood and eagerly anticipated what they were going to do and had fans and didn't have record deals, but were like stars to us.
SPEAKER_03: You wouldn't have probably known it at the time, but did it feel like you were part of something special? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: No, you definitely knew it at the time that you were in something that was very special, especially if you were able to be inside of it, to know the artist and then eventually to become an artist there. The first time that I did anything as it related to actually being a maker of art and not a consumer or a fan of art, which is a big part of the art practice is people to consume it. So I value that. And that's what my aunt Denise was. Art that sits in a room by itself can only go so far. You need the appreciator. And so my aunt was that. I was that for a long time until I was encouraged to pick up the mic and really enjoyed it. And so did that for a little while.
SPEAKER_03: Were you nervous about performing in front of other people?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think it's the rare artist who doesn't have nerves about the presentation of work. And so, yeah, definitely very nervous to get up there. I read that when you graduated, you wanted to become a journalist.
SPEAKER_03: And at some point you actually went to CBS to pursue this career path. And I guess this was what, like the mid 1990s? What were you assigned to do?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's my senior year in college. I got an internship with CBS Evening News with Dan Rather and Connie Chung.
SPEAKER_03: Based in LA at the LA Bureau.
SPEAKER_01: And this was right at the time of the OJ Simpson trial. And I was an intern with a very prestigious paid internship that I was very excited about.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. I mean, CBS. Big deal. That was like the highest. That was a big deal. Big, big deal.
SPEAKER_01: 1995. Huge deal. So that's the kind of thing you needed to move on in space. And did it and was assigned a juror on the first day. I remember going-
SPEAKER_03: You were assigned to what, to follow a juror on the OJ Simpson trial?
SPEAKER_01: You couldn't follow them because they were sequestered, but I had to sit outside of their house.
SPEAKER_03: Because obviously that was, I guess, a way to get breaking news. And what, did that feel awkward? Did that feel weird?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. So I was basically outside of this, I think it was a lady, I can't remember. And I basically just sat outside her house, you know, and saw what was coming and going and like made notes. And I remember hating it and feeling like this is stupid and wrong and I don't want to be doing this. And it really soured my appetite for news. So that was my last job in news.
SPEAKER_03: So when you really kind of began your career then at this point, I mean, you're a young woman graduate. You went into film publicity. How did you get into that?
SPEAKER_01: Because I was really interested in media still from the news days and had heard that publicists shaped the news. They are involved with media outlets. So I was really interested in the media at that time. And so I went and I worked at a small studio for a while, about a year. I was an assistant on a publicist desk and then went to an agency and worked in agency life where I was juggling multiple projects. And this was all in the film and television space.
SPEAKER_03: And how did you like it? Was it everything that you had imagined and more? Was it exciting? Did you feel like you were shaping stories?
SPEAKER_01: Yes. I love publicity to this day. If I was not a filmmaker, I would be a publicist. I think about it in terms of offering stories and presenting stories and understanding the power of publicity and that helped me understand that everyone has a story. You just have to present it correctly. And that's giving me a lot of confidence in my own storytelling as a filmmaker. Whereas I'll talk to filmmakers who will sometimes be driven by, oh, is this sellable? Can I market this? I never think that way because I know you can sell and market anything if you know how to do it, which I do. So yeah, I loved it and I still do. And I'm so happy that I had that tool set. That was my time as a publicist was really my film school in so many ways. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: I guess you worked for a few different agencies for a couple of years. And then when you were like 27, you started your own agency. And the story I read was that your dad, Murray, was the one who encouraged you to do that. He led you to realize that you weren't getting paid enough. Is that how you ended up starting your own business?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. Yeah. That was one of the steps in it. I was talking to him about some of the projects that were coming into the agency where I was at the time that were coming to the agency because there was a young black publicist working there. And that they were black films or films that were youth oriented that were coming into the agency or I was being used.
SPEAKER_03: And you were bringing those in?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. I was bringing some in or I was a centerpiece of the pitch of the agency. Like this will be your day to day and look at her and she can do this. And I get in the meeting and I do my thing and we'd get the business. So yeah, it was a conversation with my father who just got me thinking about the numbers because I was like, oh, I'm getting a nice salary. And he's like, yeah, but... And he never said it. I mean, he was just such an elegant, soft spoken, lovely man. Like I would have said, cut to Ava's version, I would have said, okay, dummy, what are you doing? And I was like, look at the money you're bringing in. But he just kind of walked me through it as, so how much are the retainers? Like how much do they pay? And I said, oh my gosh, it's like $10,000 a month. He was like, wow. So you've brought in six clients that are at $10,000 a month? And I said, yeah. He was like, so that's $60,000 a month. And I said, yeah. And he said, and how much do you get paid a year? I was like, oh, ouch. So not $720,000. Not even $60,000. How about that? So yeah, that was an eye-opener. And there was a woman who's still working today by the name of Jackie Bazan, black woman, who had one of the few black owned entertainment PR firms at the time. Jackie Bazan handled films out of the East Coast. There was another woman named Marci Devaux, who had a small practice with two people. She did television in Los Angeles. And so there were these two women who I think it's important to say their names. I saw doing it. And after my father had put that in my head, I looked for those examples and got to know
SPEAKER_01: them. And it was really Jackie Bazan who was very kind. I remember she gave me copies of her letters of agreements early on with clients. She told me how to set rates and how to do some of that stuff really early on. And even early in my own agency days, we would share films. She would do the East and I would do the West. She was very generous in that way. And so yeah, I eventually started to do film and television and home entertainment, corporate crisis event, unit publicity strategy, got into marketing promotions. And eventually by the time I closed my agency, had run campaigns for every major studio in Hollywood.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, as you kind of went on your own, one of the things that I'm always curious about is how people get customers in the early days. Did you have to go out and kind of pitch yourself or were things kind of coming in through word of mouth?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. So some of that idea of this is a young black woman and I worked on black stuff and lady stuff, anything to do with women, anything to do with youth, animation. And so that's basically how I started and that business was coming in really nicely. And yeah, we would pitch. We would pitch stuff, send out proposals, rarely cold. I had those contacts. But yeah, it was a constantly, that business is constantly trying to make sure you have enough business and that you're servicing those clients so they'll come back again.
SPEAKER_03: And were you also managing press junkets for stars? So you would be the person with them at times while they would do the five minute TV interview after interview after interview?
SPEAKER_01: Yep, that's my job. I do red carpets. That's why whenever I walk on a red carpet now, I have so much respect for the people who... That's hard work. It is very hard work. A red carpet, most people who are notable who are asked to go on a red carpet, they walk out there thinking, I'm a star, like this is, or this is my moment, or I have to do this red carpet. You know, my gosh, I don't want to do it or whatever.
SPEAKER_01: And people are yelling your name and you're doing the whole thing, but you got to think back to two weeks before when that red carpet was constructed, a media alert was written. It was sent out. Everyone that's on that carpet yelling your name was booked, confirmed, directions had to be sent to them. They arrived. They had to be put in their places. Oftentimes they will fight over their place. I want to stand here. Now I'm here. The publicist there trying to wrangle that, the red carpet company that has to come and put down the red carpet, put up the stanchions, put up the lights. There's a whole industry around this, the hair and makeup and the hotels that participate. And I mean, it's a machine and it's a machine that's around the business of making and selling movies and that's what I did.
SPEAKER_03: I've always felt like a publicist has to have the same level of patience as like a realtor or even a talent agent in that they are servicing clients who can sometimes be really difficult. Like if you're a realtor, your client might blame you if the house doesn't sell for what they want. Or if you're a publicist, the client might blame you if they don't get as much publicity as they think they should get. How would you handle that? That kind of, I don't know. Are you just super patient?
SPEAKER_01: No, I'm not patient at all. I didn't do that kind of publicity. So in your example, like a real estate agent, that's so true. The real estate agent has to be the patient one because they're interfacing with the client. I would be considered the broker. I was the publicist for the film, not the individual people. So I didn't have to deal with how you got your hair done and why you didn't like your sandwich and this person was mean to you and you don't like that question. So my clients were studios and networks, not individual people. And that was by design because I'm not patient. I'm not going to tell you everything's okay if it's not. I'm not going to sit there and listen to your sad story. When your sad story is you don't like your sandwich, you know what I'm saying? I would be the one that would be able to just have the straight talk with the client. You know what I like in it too, Guy? I was your grandmother. I'm not your mom. I don't have to go home with you and be with you forever. You come over grandma's house, you have a nice time. She sends you home after a certain period of time. That's what I was. I was with you for the period of this film and when the film is over, you go somewhere else. I wanted to be transparent, to be able to say what I meant and what we needed and just to talk straight. And I found that that really helped me as a director.
SPEAKER_03: When did you, I mean, as because I know you worked with Clint Eastwood and Bill Condon and a bunch of really well-known directors. And I read that you were brought on to work to publicity for the film Collateral, the Michael Mann film, which was kind of a turning point for you and how you started to think about what you wanted to do. Is that right?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that was a big deal for me to be on the set of Collateral. First of all, it was just so cool, the concept of the film, but also just had very hot actors at the time. Tom Cruise, Jada Pinkett, Jamie Foxx, a young Javier Bardem, and it was just an exhilarating project to work on. But yeah, something happened on that set. I, a couple things. First of all, he was using these digital cameras and it was the first time I'd ever seen a film shot on a digital camera. He was one of the first to use these digital cameras called Vipers, which could shoot through the night. You could see the depth of the night. It would capture distance in the night, which is why that film looks so milky and gorgeous. And then also he was shooting in a part of town that I knew very well, East LA, shot a lot in East LA with brown people and black people. And the story had black people in it and brown people. And I thought, wow, he's shooting kind of like in the hoods that I know. And I just began watching him and thinking, oh, I want to do that. I'd been on many sets before and it never really hit me like I want to do that. I'd been on sets before where I thought I could do that.
SPEAKER_01: I could do what he's doing. You know, I mean, everyone's on a set watches at now. I know people think that now because they're watching me on a set and they'd be like, I can do, I can totally do that. But, um, it wasn't until I was on that set where I thought, oh, I want to do that. I want to use those cameras. I want to tell a story like this with actors like this. And so that really catalyzed the idea of trying to make some films.
SPEAKER_03: When we come back in just a moment, how Ava made her first 12 minute movie and how a chance meeting on an airplane would change the trajectory of her career. Stay with us. I'm Gary Diroz and you're listening to how I built this. I talk with so many business leaders who use Squarespace as their all-in-one platform for building their brand and engaging customers online. Squarespace lets you easily create a dynamic website and sell anything. Like products and services, even the content you create. Squarespace makes it really easy to get started with best in class website templates for all types of businesses that can be customized to fit your specific needs. Squarespace also provides the tools you need to run your business smoothly, including inventory management, a simple checkout process and secure payments. And with Squarespace email campaigns, you can build a community of email subscribers and customers. Start with an email template and customize it by applying your own brand ingredients like colors and logo. And once you send, built-in analytics measure your emails impact. Check out squarespace.com slash built for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code built to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So this summer I finally decided to stop inadvertently killing the plants in my garden and really learn how to do gardening the right way. And helping me along that journey was Ron Finley on Masterclass. Ron is one of the great gardeners of our time and in his class, you will learn everything from the basics to the fundamentals of building a home garden and more. With Masterclass, you can learn from the world's best minds anytime, anywhere and at your own pace. Annual membership start at $10 a month and you get unlimited access to every instructor, thousands of online lessons, exclusive content, insights and much more. There are over 180 classes to pick from, everything from sales and persuasion with Daniel Pink to tennis with Serena Williams, with new classes added every month. The Ron Finley class, for example, teaches you how to grow your own food and keep your plants alive. And it really allows you to find the beauty and freedom in gardening, no matter the size of your space. And I've loved how easy it is to fit the lessons into my day, even if I only watch for 10 minutes before bed. Get unlimited access to every class and right now, as a How I Built This listener, you can get 15% off when you go to masterclass.com slash built. That's masterclass.com slash built for 15% off an annual membership. Masterclass.com slash built. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So by 2005, Ava DuVernay is running her own successful business as a publicist in Hollywood. She's also watching a lot of other people make movies. And she's starting to think, you know, I want to do this as well. It was my proximity to it that made it feel maybe this is possible to tinker with.
SPEAKER_01: Because I'd been on sets. And so I knew that real people made movies that they did not, you know, appear right. Also I think the big piece of the puzzle is, and this is a big piece that I don't think I've ever articulated, but I've thought about for myself. I had no dreams of the outcome other than making a movie like that was, it wasn't let me make a movie to get famous, to get an Academy Award, to be rich, to be famous. That was not in my head. And the reason why it wasn't in my head is because there was nobody doing that, right? Like there was, I won't say nobody, but there was nobody that looked like me. Like there were very few black women making films at the time. There were a couple I knew by name and I'd seen that they'd made a film, but no one had gone on to great fame and acclaim and all of the things. So I think one of the core pieces of the journey was it started from such a pure place of just wanting to make a movie and to tell a story. It was all about that and it wasn't about the outcome or the things that would come after. I think now these days it takes a lot more because you can see we're out there.
SPEAKER_01: There's a good number, nice number of us. You see, I want to be like Shonda or Issa and what did they do and how can I get to that level and do those things? I didn't have that so I didn't have to think about it.
SPEAKER_03: I remember when I was 21 and I was an intern at NPR. I'd never done any radio in my life. I didn't know anything about it. I just liked listening. And the way I learned how to do it was by cutting reel to reel with a razor blade and doing it really badly. And over time I learned how to do that, the technical side. How did you start to learn the technical side of making movies?
SPEAKER_01: Well that's a good question. For me, early on I had to embrace what I did know how to do and not be intimidated by what I didn't know how to do. And I had been around enough filmmakers as a publicist to see that not all filmmakers were technically proficient. That the core of what made a great filmmaker was did you know the story? Not did you know the lens, did you know the technical aspects? But there are a lot of filmmakers out there who are story and performance focused and less technically focused. I thought the most important thing is the story. And all these people around me are supposed to know that stuff. So if I can write the story then I will be the leader of the story because it came out of my mind and no one will know more about it than I will. And from there I made sure that I surrounded myself with people who did know their jobs. And one of the things that I learned from running my own business was to never be shy about saying I don't know.
SPEAKER_01: And that that, especially for women and for women of color, black women, you know, to feel like you won't be taken seriously if you don't know everything. To feel like you cannot ask a question were all things that I had to combat. But the reason why I felt entitled to do it is because I saw white men do it. I see white guys all the time don't know what the hell they're doing. But you know what they do have? Confidence. They're going to get out there and say I want to figure it out and I'm sure I'll be okay. I'm sure I can figure this out. And so especially when you're an independent filmmaker you're really putting together small crew crews of people who will work for whatever money you can give them. And so there's a lot more grace there because everyone's kind of learning together. So that's what I did in the early years.
SPEAKER_03: You made your first film. I think it was a short film Saturday Night Life in 2005. And it's 12 minutes. I haven't seen it. I've been looking for it. It's hard to find. I have my ways to make things disappear.
SPEAKER_01: Well let's talk about it then just for a moment.
SPEAKER_03: From what I understand the story was about when you were a little girl your mom would dress you up and listen to people compliment you and your sisters. Is that what was the film about?
SPEAKER_01: The film was about yeah I told my mom I wanted to make a short film and try to make something. I had been taking these extension classes at UCLA. Film extension classes where you would, you know there's weekend courses on two days to talk about how to make a short film. That kind of thing. And so I decided I was going to make a short film and I was asking my mom I need to figure out a little story to tell and she reminded me about this. Which is basically that she, before she met my dad, when we were little, she was really
SPEAKER_01: really struggling as a single mom. Struggling with money, struggling with her confidence, everything. The way that she would cheer herself up was she would dress us up, grease us down. Now the greasing down is important so our skin shines so vaseline on our little brown faces and arms and chubby legs, put us in our patent leather shoes, our matching dresses because it was me and my two sisters so there were three of us. Do our hair, take us in the car on hardly any gas to the alpha beta which was the grocery store. And we would go there and she would dress us all up just to get a cup of noodles or a bag of chips or whatever she could afford.
SPEAKER_01: And she would do that, it makes me emotional just to say it, she would do that because she knew that her girls were so beautiful that someone would say, look at those girls, they're so pretty. You're doing a good job.
SPEAKER_01: And she'd buy her pack of gum or bottle of soda or whatever it was, we'd get in the car, we'd split it and we'd drive home. Get ready for bed and just go to school the next day. And that was something that she did because she could get someone to say, you're okay, you're doing good and to see her. So that's the short. It was a single mom who woke up, who was having a hard time, she dressed up the girls, she took them to the store and it was the things that were said to her in the store. And then she drove them home. And I had no idea what I was doing. All I knew is I knew how to hustle up getting a grocery store. We got a store to let us shoot in there. And I think I made the whole thing on like, I don't know, five grand or something. But I made it.
SPEAKER_03: And you were not pitching this to the grocery store as a student film, right? You were just saying, I'm making a film or do you remember how you- No, I wasn't a student, I was a grown woman with a PR firm.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. So I went and I made it and had no clue how to edit it together. I remember I showed a friend, I haven't thought about this since it probably happened. I showed a friend of mine who made independent films, hey, come see my cut of this film.
SPEAKER_01: She was like, okay, so she watched it. I haven't thought about this. And she said, this is really good. I think this is interesting. I think you're on your way to something. Like all the things I say to people now when clearly it's not good enough. You know what, you're on your way to something. She said, you know what you might want to do? And I was like, what? She's like, you might want to put some music in here. I said, music? She's like, yeah, you know how you go to the movies and you hear music? And I was like, oh yeah, music. Yes, music. I had shown this woman a cut with no music. It was dry. A lick of a cue, not a piano string, nothing was in it. That's how little I know about how to put a movie together.
SPEAKER_03: And did you do anything with the film? Did you try to, I mean, you were a publicist, so you had that experience. Did you try to screen it and get it out into the world in any way?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there was no market for shorts, which is just further evidence of I didn't really care about the outcome. I remember my big goal was, ah, it would be great if I can get this into a festival. And someone said, oh, people don't really care about shorts at the big film festivals. You got to go to a shorts festival. And the biggest shorts festival, there were like three big festivals at the time in the world.
SPEAKER_01: One of them was in the United States. So Palm Springs Short Film Festival, really considered one of the top festivals at the time. So it's like, oh, Palm Springs, that's possible. So I submitted it to Palm Springs. And I remember the day I got the letter, I was in my office, and I got this letter that the film was accepted. And literally, I did not feel that same joy, even when I got the Academy Award nomination. Like, nothing has since felt as euphoric and like breaking me wide open as the Palm Springs
SPEAKER_01: Short Film Festival acceptance. I thought, oh my god, isn't this a miracle?
SPEAKER_01: And the first time seeing the film with an audience is in a shorts block. So it's like six other films. And I think my film was fourth or something. I remember it was coming up. I was so nervous. And for the first time being in the back of a theater, I mean, any filmmaker that's in the screening of their films not watching the film, they're watching the audience. So you're watching the backs of heads. I've become really good at watching the backs of heads. I can tell what you're feeling by your neck at this point. And watching just the side view of the light of the screen hit people's faces as they smile, as they nod, as they cry, whatever. That feeling just, you know, it was my first hit. And I was addicted. And I've been addicted ever since.
SPEAKER_03: When you made that film, right, so now you have a real film with real cameras that you used and real equipment and with a real cast. It was just 12 minutes, but it was a movie. It was a movie that you made. You were still also an entrepreneur. You had a business. You were running a publicity business. And did you think to yourself, I think this is where I'm headed. I think this is where I'm going into this direction. Or did you still think it was just something that you really enjoyed and it was a passion?
SPEAKER_01: I've really enjoyed it. It was a passion. And the reason why is because there was no precedent for sustainable livelihood as a black woman filmmaker as recently as 2012. I'm seriously telling you, this is not humility or me saying, no, golly geez, I never saw it. Like literally, I could look at no one to say she is making a full living in supporting her family alone on making movies as recently as 2012. There was a woman named Gina Prince-Bythewood who was formative in that I knew her personally, knew her, was around her. I was a probabilist on a couple of things. And she was actually, she and her husband were pretty instrumental in encouraging me in my script writing early on. They were my clients.
SPEAKER_01: But there were two of them and they were black filmmakers and she had made a great film called Love and Basketball and they were out pitching their things and making work. But yet and still, they were many years in between the films that they were making. And she was the only one I knew, like one person. So for me, what I could see was a woman named Lynn Shelton, a white woman out of Seattle
SPEAKER_01: who was a filmmaker who made very tiny films that were so good. And she somehow made a film almost every year. And I thought, oh, maybe I can be like Lynn Shelton and make like a little film every year that goes to festivals. Like she gets to travel with her film. There's like a review in the paper. It's nice. I want it to be like her. Still thinking I will have to have a job. I will have to have a job. That was the extent of it.
SPEAKER_03: You went on to make a documentary about the Good Life Cafe where you had performed back in college. And then I guess right after that, you start to work on an entirely different kind of film, a narrative which was based on your experience of taking care of your aunt, Aunt Denise, who had been sick with cancer a few years earlier, right?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah. She had had a recurrence of her breast cancer. It was like a stage two the first time she had a surgery and then it came back like six years later, which was the cruel part. You know, say, oh, five years, you're out of the woods. And then like in the sixth year, it came back at a stage four. And I remember because we moved into a house together after she got diagnosed, I gave up my apartment. I moved her out of her apartment and we moved to an apartment near the beach in an area that she always wanted to live in in Long Beach because at that point she was basically given a death sentence, a certain amount of time to live. And so I went to make sure that she was in a place that she found beautiful and enjoyed.
SPEAKER_03: And so the film basically tells a story of a young woman dealing with the loss of her beloved aunt. And you named it after, I guess you named after the U2 song, I Will Follow. So what tell me about that connection?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the connection is that Denise, my aunt, was a big U2 fan and really passed on that love of them to me. I remember, you know, she one of the things about her is that she loved things that people in her family and in her community didn't necessarily have access to, to love. I won't say they didn't love it. Just say they didn't hear it. They didn't know it. They would have loved it if they would have had access to it and felt like it was something that they were exposed to. But she exposed herself to it and somehow, you know, she loved rock. And of course she loved all the quote unquote black music too, but she had a broader palette. Anyway, within that, she loved U2. She took me to my first Amnesty International concert. You know, crap seats because she didn't have any money in a concert hall. I think it was the Coliseum. And U2 comes out and she said, listen to this song.
SPEAKER_01: And it was like all white people. And like, this is a very white environment. Okay. And I was not used to that, but she walked on up there. We're in there. And she said, listen to this song. It's about Martin Luther King.
SPEAKER_03: Pride. I was like, it's about Martin Luther King?
SPEAKER_01: They're saying about Martin Luther King? Like, yeah, listen to it, Ava. Listen to it. I get emotional. I could cry right now thinking about it. So Bono and the Edge and Larry Muddles, they are up there rocking out to Pride. I'm trying to catch the lyrics. I'm trying to, and I start to hear the story and I started to put it together. And I was like, I think this is about Martin Luther King. And that was it. Hook, Line and Sinker, can't tell me nothing about U2. Love him, love him, love him. So the title of the film, which is about my last year living with my aunt Denise before she passed, is entitled, I Will Follow, which is a famous U2 song.
SPEAKER_03: And from what I understand, Ava, the film was self-distributed, right? And I'm curious about this idea because I think a lot of people who are not in the film industry don't quite understand how this works. So when you say you are self-distributed, does that mean that you are literally sending it out, like sending out the films to theaters to screen? Like what does that entail? Yeah, I would liken it to someone who bakes a cake in their kitchen and then has to somehow
SPEAKER_01: get it on the shelf of the grocery store. Wow. Like you're a lady who makes cakes. Okay, but how do you get it in the Walmart? Yeah. So that's distribution. And so an independent film is a homemade cake and theaters are Walmarts. Big chains are Walmarts. Now it's got to be much easier for that homemade baker to get their goods in a small local bakery.
SPEAKER_03: A small independent theater. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: And so that's what we did. So we would go to them and we would talk about the film and try to get the film in these theaters. And there's a lot of segregation in those theaters. A lot of, it's another part of the puzzle of Hollywood that's very close to people of color, particularly black people, because they're not owned by us and you have to trust and hope that the person that you're pitching the story to sees the value in the story. So if I'm pitching a story about a black woman who is dying of cancer and her niece, and they both love you too, and they're just talking about life or death issues in the house, which is what I will follow us. If you don't think that you have an audience for that, if you're not sure how your audience will take to it, then you won't book it because you have seats to sell, right? It's a business. Yeah. Yeah. And so that distribution is, we take this film and we somehow get it into the local bakery, into the bigger chains. And so that was what we did, store by store, cake by cake, hand to hand. And so one of the things we tapped into was all the beautiful black film festivals around the country who had supported me as a filmmaker early on with the short films, the early documentary. I went to them and I said, look, you're the only person I know in Boston, Boston Black Film Festival, urban world in New York. I don't know people out there, but I know you. Would you help me get this film out? Would you help me present this film? And so started to put together a coalition of black film festivals that not only supported my work outside of their festival because they had lists of film lovers, black film lovers. They had relationships with theaters where they showed their festivals. They had a marketing apparatus around their festivals. So I was able to convince those festivals to pull the trigger on their marketing apparatus
SPEAKER_01: when their festival was not in session and to split the profits of whatever I made at the box office with them. And so that's how I created the African American Film Festival Releasing Movement, which we called Affirm. Right.
SPEAKER_03: And then the Affirm becomes like this sort of independent distribution company, I think, like sort of sending out indie films to theaters and festivals. And later, of course, which we'll get to, Affirm becomes a Ray, which is what it's known as today.
SPEAKER_01: Mm-hmm. And that was covered on CNN and New York Times and this new way of distributing black film in a very kind of a grass rooted way. Eventually, I'm not stopping knocking on doors. I'm eventually, you know, eventually got us into AMC theaters. Yeah. But yeah, you know, also was really accepting and really thinking about where are there other spaces where we can show film? Why can't I show film at the museum? They have a screen. Why can't I show film at the university? Why can't I show film at the, you know, Black Women's Sorority, Rotary Club, whatever. So started to count those as screens.
SPEAKER_03: That film I will follow ended up getting some pretty great reviews. I mean, Roger Ebert was basically telling everyone to go see it. I think he said it was one of the best films he'd seen about the death of a loved one. And then after that, you start working on your next film called Middle of Nowhere. And I want to ask you about funding for that because as I understand it, you were financing these films with your own money. Like for I Will Follow, you used the money you'd saved up for a down payment on a house. So when you started to work on Middle of Nowhere, did you also sell finance or did you try to raise money?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the second one, I used profits from the first one. Plus my landlord in my office building said, oh, I have some friends who might invest. And so he collected 20,000, 10,000, 50,000 from some people he knew that were doing pretty well. Not film people, just people who had an extra 20 grand to spare. And we put together like $250,000 in May, Middle of Nowhere. That film, I think was also the first time you worked with David Oyelowo.
SPEAKER_03: How did you guys meet? How did you come together? Well, this is a very rare example of me getting a phone call from an actor saying, I've read
SPEAKER_01: the script. He called you? He called me out of the blue one day. I knew who he was as an actor, but he wasn't huge at that time. I mean, I knew he was because I know all the black actors, but he had been like, he had had a small part, one scene in Lincoln, Spielberg's Lincoln. He played like the bad guy in Planet of the Apes. He had had like small roles in good films. He had been on a plane to do looping, which is additional dialogue recording ADR on Planet of the Apes.
SPEAKER_01: He was flying from LA to Toronto to do ADR and sitting next to a man, so strange, who says, oh my gosh, is this you? The man opens his laptop and he's been watching on his laptop a show that David was in in the UK called Spooks, Spy Show. And David's like, oh yeah, that's me. You know, thank you. Thank you. They get to talking and the guy in about a half hour in says, can I ask you, ask you
SPEAKER_01: your advice on just something that's come my way? This weird thing that's come my way. He's like, I have nothing to do with entertainment industry, but I've been asked by my friend to invest in this independent film. Should I? David's like, oh, bad idea. Never invest. Don't invest in a film. You know, who is it? And he said, yeah, it's by this woman, this black woman. I thought you might know her name, Ava DuVernay. Just a week before he had seen me on CNN talking about Affirm, which was our distribution thing.
SPEAKER_01: He had said, I just saw her on CNN. He said, can I read the script? So the guy gives him the script. He reads the script on the rest of the flight. He gives it back to the guy afterward. He says to the guy, we should go have dinner. The guy was like, this is an actor on a show that I was watching on my laptop. Yeah, let's go have dinner. They go have a steak dinner. Like that night, like they get up the plane? Like that or the next night or something. Wherein David convinces this guy to invest in the film and then calls me when he lands at LAX and says, hi, my name is David Oyelowo. And he said, you know, if there's any part for me in this, I would hope, and I asked you to consider me. And I said, oh, this is really lovely. You've really boosted my confidence today. I just want to thank you because this is really lovely. I know by the time this gets to your agents, they're going to kill, they're going to say
SPEAKER_03: no. No way. Cause there's no money in it.
SPEAKER_01: Look, I'm going to give you a hug at the end. There's no check. It's hugs. What are you talking about? But thank you. And he said, oh, that's kind of you to say, but I just want you to realize one thing. If I say I'm going to do something, I'm going to do it. And you should know my agents work for me. I don't work for them. Wow. I was like, okay. And sure enough, cut to three months later, we're on the set. And his seat mate was an investor in the film. That's an amazing story. It is an amazing story, especially when you consider what happened next. Which, which we will get to in a moment.
SPEAKER_03: After the break, we'll hear more from Ava about the path that led her to Sundance and eventually to making some of the most powerful films of the past decade. Stay with us. I'm Matt DeRoz, and you're listening to How I Built This. 90% of startups fail.
SPEAKER_03: 90%. Just 10 out of every 100 last. In order to succeed, startups need grit, talent, and the ability to perform at the highest level. That's where Mercury comes in. Mercury is banking engineered for the startup journey. A modern solution to help your company become the best version of itself. To eliminate the hurdles that come with traditional banking. To offer a product crafted to help you scale, with safety and stability. To go beyond banking and provide access to the foremost investors, operators, and tools. Because when you can operate with confidence, building your company becomes an art form. Join over 100,000 companies banking with Mercury at mercury.com. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank and Trust. Members FDIC. Hey welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2012 and Ava DuVernay has submitted her latest film, the one with David Oyelowo, to the Sundance Film Festival. And by the way, it's not the first time she's submitted something to Sundance. She's done that several times before and been rejected every time. But this time, with the film Middle of Nowhere? I got in.
SPEAKER_01: And got into the top category dramatic competition and ended up winning.
SPEAKER_03: You won Best Director. Wow. I think even up until that point, like you were running a publicity company and you were really good at it and you were really successful. But winning Best Director at a film festival like that, that's working at the top of your craft. Like did you, what did you remember thinking when that happened?
SPEAKER_01: I remember thinking I should think about trying to really do this full time. I would think so. Yeah. So I remember thinking, wow, this is, I cannot believe I won this and that if I'm ever going to do this, the time is now to try to strike out and do this full time so I can be Lynne Shelton and maybe make a film a year that I don't have to pay for. And that was truly, I thought, gosh, I could just support myself on movies. That's the first time that idea came to my head. And I remember giving myself six months to wean myself off of my business and give my clients to other PR firms and just kind of transition the business into being more of a film distribution entity because at that point I had distributed two of my own films. And I thought, if nothing else, if this fails, I know I can distribute films for other filmmakers. If my films don't continue on, I can help other people's films continue on. So that's how my filmmaking and our business of array started to become really intertwined.
SPEAKER_03: What's so interesting is that I'm sure at that time there were people who interviewed you and were surprised to learn that you weren't a full time filmmaker or that you had a publicity
SPEAKER_03: company. But when you think about it, what you were doing as a publicist was shaping stories and telling stories. And that's what you do as a filmmaker. So actually, as you explain your evolution from one to another, it makes total sense because they're actually slightly different versions of the same thing.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, for sure. It's crafting story. Yeah, I agree. You know, the main thing about being a director is you have to convince people or inspire people to want to do the thing that you need done. And through it all, talking to actors, which is a big part of if you ask any director, young director, what is the piece that they're scared of? Almost all of them will say talking to the actor. But it is your job to talk to the actor and get out of that other human being with their own history, mind and thoughts and heart, what you think will service the whole project. So talking to the actor, I mean, it's not like talking to your grandma, like these are the actor has their own like, some of them are warm and fuzzy, and some of them aren't. But for me, publicity, it prepared me to talk to the actor to deal with actors and to be comfortable around them.
SPEAKER_03: I think of a director as like, a CEO, and a COO at the same time, like you are running operations, but you are in charge and responsible for everything.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think of the director as the mayor of a small town, because a film has every element of a small town. I mean, a fire department, a hospital, a the medic, you know what I mean? There's some people working construction, there's some people working with the food, there's someone that's in charge of the bathrooms, there's someone that's in charge of the stuff that's going to come after, the visual effects, the color, the actors. I mean, it is literally, you know, it's dozens of departments of everyone doing their little piece just like in a town, like everyone has to know what we're doing, but also feel, I like people to feel free to contribute beyond their role. If you have an idea, say it. If something's not working, say it. And to be able to kind of manage all of that.
SPEAKER_03: I read in an interview you gave, and you talked about after you won Best Director of Sundance, this was your quote, you said, there was no golden ticket that unlocked the riches of Hollywood for me. There were no studio meetings, there were no studio calls, there were no offers to do things. I mean, you had won this incredibly prestigious award and you didn't return to LA with like an inbox just jammed with offers.
SPEAKER_01: No. I didn't. There were some things that came through. I got an opportunity to make a short film for a fashion brand. And while very different than the trajectory of my white male counterparts who had won the award the years before me, who basically slid into movie deals, you know, I found myself making a short afterward for a brand. I was grateful for it. I got to make something on someone else's money and I loved what I made. It was a piece for Prada called The Door. But it was much different than, you know, one of my fellow filmmakers at Sundance who won the screenwriting award that year, who within six months had a deal to direct the sequel to Jurassic Park. You know, there were differences, but, you know, kept going. What can you do?
SPEAKER_03: You were not originally meant to be the director of the film that really became the first major film that you would direct in terms of budget, which was Selma. You were originally not meant to be the director of that film, right?
SPEAKER_01: No, I think it was the eighth. The eighth, seventh or eighth or something. And not like seventh or eighth director that they called. This is seventh director who actually had a contract to make the movie. Like, that many people had dropped out.
SPEAKER_03: And part of it was because the budget was so small, right?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the budget was so small. Twenty million dollars or something. Twenty million dollars. Imagine, I mean, I just told you what I was making films with before. So imagine someone says, Twenty million dollars to make a film. I'm like, are you crazy? Yes, I can do it. I can do it. I have no idea, but I promise you I can do it. And of course that opportunity only came to me because of David.
SPEAKER_03: Who called you because he read your screenplay on an airplane and then was in your film in the middle of nowhere. He was cast in Selma. And how did what happened? I mean, how did he get you involved in that film? He was cast in Selma by the director who left the film before because of budget.
SPEAKER_01: He had always knew, and his mother, rest in peace, had been very much a champion of him playing Dr. King. And he always knew that somehow he was going to play Dr. King. So he, this is something that's been with him for many, many years. So this King movie is moving around town. He, I think the story is that he had auditioned for it with another director and didn't get it. And when the director before me auditioned him, he was cast as Dr. King.
SPEAKER_01: But when that director, I don't know why I'm pretending like it's Lee Daniels. It's Lee Daniels. Okay. I mean, what the heck? Why are we, you can Google. There's a thing called Google Now guy. We've got to say the names. Yep. So when Lee Daniels left the film, basically David being scrappy, the same scrappy guy that's going to take a stranger on the plane to steak dinner to advocate, to invest in a film for a woman he doesn't know and a film he's not in, said, just because the director's left doesn't mean I can't still play Dr. King. So he says to the producers, if I can find another director who will do it for $20 million,
SPEAKER_01: can you consider still making the film and I can still play Dr. King? So cut to this woman he just worked with on this film, one Sundance. He says to me, you're going to need to rewrite this film and make it for $20 million. Would you consider doing it? I never saw myself making a civil rights drama. It's just a kind of movie that I would never watch. And he said, well, could you make one that you would watch?
SPEAKER_01: And I thought, ah, that's interesting. And having not a lot of options on the table at that time and having that challenge from him, I started to become very attracted to the idea of doing it. And so I said, I will take a swing at this script and I will try. The whole deal was if I could write a script that could be made for $20 million, that was good, they would make it.
SPEAKER_03: You had to rewrite the entire script and from what I understand, I mean, the King family owns the rights to his speeches. You couldn't, you had to recreate his speeches without using the same words.
SPEAKER_01: The King family doesn't have rights to speeches, but an estate has the right to speeches and the estate had already given the rights to the speeches to another filmmaker who was much more famous than I was because nobody knew who I was. You know who it was?
SPEAKER_03: Was it Steven Spielberg?
SPEAKER_01: Look at this guy, well researched. Yes. Steven Spielberg had the rights to the speeches in film at that time. And so in order to tell the story, the way around it was to approximate or to rewrite Dr. King's speeches. Easy. No problem, right? How did you do that? I don't know. I remember writing it. I remember doing the story first, which needed to be changed from something that was a lot of kind of trying to have political intrigue. It was a lot of stuff with the president and to really imbue it with a sense of black people on the ground in Selma. The film was called Selma, not President Johnson, right? So it was about taking what I'd learned as an African American studies major at UCLA, what I learned as a daughter of my father who was from Lowndes County, Alabama, which sits right two minutes from Selma, what I knew about all of my summers growing up, visiting my father's family in Alabama in the summers, and to just pour all of that into the screenplay. And then afterward I tackled the speeches and I remember submitting it and getting a really fast answer back, we're going to run a budget on it, but this is fantastic. And if we can get this down to 20 million, you're going to be in production. And then we were.
SPEAKER_03: You filmed, I think it took you like 30 days to film that movie, which is kind of nuts, right? I mean, to make a whole feature. It took you 30 days feels like, oh, it just took you 30 days for you had only 30 days.
SPEAKER_01: Okay. Maybe that's what you had. That's what I had. It was like 31 or 32 days or something like that. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: So to make that work, you have to probably spend twice as much time like organizing every minute of the day, right? Like planning that out in super detail.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. Yeah. A lot of heavy prep and really important to have people around you who know what they're doing. The challenge with the period piece, as one can imagine listening is if I'm making a movie about now I can go out, find a location. And if there's a scene in a grocery store, I just walk into the grocery store and I shoot. If I'm making a movie about, you know, the sixties, I've got to find a grocery store that still looks like the sixties or change it to look like the sixties. Every single thing that's on the shelf has to look like the sixties and every actor has to be dressed like they're in the sixties. So I can't just pull clothes off the store. Everything has to be made and rented. And so that's how white period pieces cost so much. And that's why the 20 million, you know, goes quickly because every, every street light sign shoe car, everything has to be period. So the way that this film came about, I always trace back to that random flight that David had on the film before. And I know that that's not random for me. That's a part of the design of why I'm supposed to be doing what I'm doing and how things fall into place. I believe that everything's for a reason. And so that, that set was really intense with a spirit of this is meant to be.
SPEAKER_03: Even when Selma came out, it was, and is, widely praised, but you were not nominated for best director.
SPEAKER_03: And I know that this is probably kind of a sensitive question, but I don't know. I mean, did it matter? Were you hurt by that?
SPEAKER_01: I wasn't hurt by the not getting best director and I'll tell you why. I was hurt by David not getting best actor nomination for him not to be nominated. That was, I remember the moment, I just, that was the moment where I was, you know, really at the wind knocked out of me. Yeah. The reason why I wasn't hurt by getting best director is because statistically speaking, there was no way for that to happen. And people are like, Ava, what are you talking about? I just, I had worked in the industry as a publicist. I've done Oscar campaigns. And it's a campaign. It is a campaign and it is a very specific route to the nomination. And it just wasn't going to happen. I do not know at that time, did not know any of those people and they did not know me.
SPEAKER_03: The academy electors or my branch, the director's branch.
SPEAKER_01: Okay. Right. I did not go to film school. I did not interface with them. I did not live in the same places. I did not speak the same film language. I didn't know them and they didn't know me. On top of that, no black woman director had ever been nominated in the history of the academy, which at that point is many decades. So that's against me. So when I say no, I wasn't, I wasn't pushed out of shape about it. People have to remember what the times were. There was no precedent for it to ever happen. So I was not delusional enough to think, oh, I'm going to be the one.
SPEAKER_03: I'm curious about what you think makes a great director. Do you think that great directors are great because they can get actors to give them their best work? Is that a definition of what makes a director strong? No, I don't think so because I think, uh, I mean, I think that's a part of it, but I
SPEAKER_01: mean, you can have a great actor give a fantastic performance in a film that's yeeks not working. We've all seen that. For me, it's a film that I can look at a film and say, oh, that person got their vision out. Like they, they told the story that they wanted to tell. Like I made a film called Marie-Clinne Time. I look at that film and for all of the beautiful experiences that I had on it and for the beauty
SPEAKER_01: that I think is in the film, it's not my film, right? It was the first time I made a film for a massive studio and went through a process of a kind of like group filmmaking.
SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean? Like a lot of people with a lot of opinions who have a lot more power than you do. And ultimately you compromise and you get to the end and you say, okay, I think this will be okay. You know, and sit back and say, oh, okay. That wasn't quite what I meant. Not quite what I started out wanting to do. And that, that was okay. That was what that experience was for me in my career. So many directors go through that. There were so many, there are many people around the world that I continue to hear from about the film in ways that are nourishing and necessary and beautiful. But I look at the film and I remember the process and it was a process that wasn't all my process. So I think that the successful film is the film that the filmmaker can say, that's more, that is more of what I had in mind than it's not. And the closer you can get to that being kind of 100% is, you know, now you're in freedom land. And that's what I experienced on I Will Follow Cause No One Cared, Middle of Nowhere Cause No One Cared, Selma Cause Really No One Cared. You know what I mean? They cared, but they really let me have that.
SPEAKER_03: It was still yours, right? It was still mine.
SPEAKER_01: I thrive in smaller environments. And so after that went on to do 13th and to do When They See Us in spaces where I could get 100% of what I wanted out, out. And so that's my deficit is I kind of have to, I have to have room to move and can't really make movies by committee. I can make movies with collaborators. I can hear, you know, insight and criticism and ideas, but I can't really like give up parts. You know, I can't, it's hard for me.
SPEAKER_03: Could you imagine working on a big budget film like A Wrinkle in Time again, or not really, not that you want to kind of focus on things that you shape?
SPEAKER_01: I've had the most success with the work that I have done unhindered. You know, whether it's the independent films and the success that they had, Selma, which was a really hands-off process, 13th, which was And When They See Us, which is Netflix saying, hello, ma'am, would you like this money to make something that's important to you? Well, yes, thank you. When will I see you again? Oh, when you're finished, that is the perfect time for me to see you again. Thank you. Whether it's my film, my TV projects now, you know, I have the most, you know, success with networks that are really saying, hey, ma'am, we're paying you for your voice, and we're going to let you do you. That's the stuff that really works. So if there was something that was big budget where that kind of space was allowed or given to me, afforded to me, and it exists, it exists for some filmmakers, if I was ever presented with something like that, and it was something that meant something to me, and I was attracted to, sure. But, you know, right now the things that I'm focused on are much, you get more leeway when you are spending less money. So I'd rather have leeway and less money. I mean, it's interesting, this idea of creating your art on your own terms, right?
SPEAKER_03: Because that is what you are doing with your company, which you rebranded, you call it, it's now known as Array. Because it's not just a distribution and production company and a nonprofit, but it's kind of like a movement, right? Like you do all kinds of outreach, and you've got a database of people of color working in the industry. I mean, the ambition of what you built there is big. So it seems to me that actually you can do many bigger things by doing it on your own, right?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. And I'm getting this idea of doing it on your own, because I was just talking to, I just did a panel with some fellow artists for Freeze in New York, this kind of art week in New York. And I was talking about, like sometimes wishing that I was one of my white male counterparts who does not have to labor on top of the film, like who can just make his film, who doesn't also have to go make the speech to the independent film, right? Cinema houses, who doesn't have to try to create film literacy in our community and build a screening room that's free for the community to learn about films from around the world, because there's no movie theaters in our neighborhoods. Who doesn't have to create initiatives on my sets where I have to focus on equalizing opportunities for women directors, who just doesn't have to do that. My white guy friends don't sit on panels about this stuff. They don't get called for articles about this stuff. They don't have to do it. They just can make their stuff. You know, I talk to filmmaker friends at a, you know, these days it's a Zoom, but you run into someone in the store or something and, you know, what are you working on? And they're telling you about a film. Well, what am I working on? Dude, you don't want to frigging know. Like I'm talking to CEOs about inclusion. I'm fighting for, you know, to get more black folks in these unions so that they can be hired as crew. Like I'm doing a lot more than just being able to sit home and make my movie. Yeah. And so I'm in a place right now where I really have to interrogate my feelings about doing that where in some moments of the day I'm like, I shouldn't have to do this.
SPEAKER_01: You know, if this is an equal playing field, then it should be equal for all of us without me having to do this extra work on top of my art making. But within that, the joy, right? The freedom of expression, the building of new ideas, the disrupting of systems, the innovation that I've experienced by doing all that outweighs the days where I think I wish I didn't have to do all this. So I think right now, Array is 10 years old. It is a nonprofit that has community outreach and educational initiatives and learning guides for everything that I create. It's physical buildings.
SPEAKER_03: You have a campus.
SPEAKER_01: It's a four building campus in historic Filipino town in Los Angeles. We have, you know, we're vaccinating people and community screenings and literacy and, you know, a three day film festival to educate the community about Filipinx films or, you know, the French New Wave or to teach kids how to read subtitles or to, there's all kinds of stuff going on, right? That stuff is, it's magic. It's beautiful to me and it's come out of a place of absence, but it has become a place of abundance.
SPEAKER_03: There's a quote that I read in an article, an interview you gave and you said, you were talking about the entertainment industry and you said, we need to be thinking more broadly about how we not only reform the system, but rebuild the system, which is huge. Just a huge, enormous task ahead. Do you think that's either happening or will happen?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think it will happen.
SPEAKER_01: It may not happen and be fully realized in my time, but someone's going to see it right in the future or someone's going to be activated by it. And you know, this whole journey is just all of us taking our own little steps, like especially the journey of black people, the journey of women, the journey of black directors, like each person's lifetime is just one step in a long walk to get to a certain place. And so I'm hoping that my step can be a big one. I'm like trying to leap and get us a lot further in my time. And that's really my hope for Array, that this is something that even after I'm gone, you know, even if my time on this planet is done, could the principles and the work and the way of working that I'm trying to embed in this kind of Array way, can that continue on without me? That's the goal.
SPEAKER_03: When you trace your life story, just everything that you've experienced and all of the, just the, I mean, it's a life of somebody who followed their curiosity, really. How much of where you are today do you attribute to just the grind and how hard you worked in? And does any part of you attribute any of it to luck as well? Or what do you think?
SPEAKER_01: I guess I attribute it to luck, but I don't call it luck. You know, I think it's my path and these are blessings. This is designed and it's up to me to work to live up to these moments that are put in front of me. But certainly in the way that you're defining it, I would say luck. Yeah, work really hard, but you could work really hard and never get the breaks. You know, work really hard and never be seen, be heard. You can work really hard and, you know, no one reads your scripts on a plane and calls you the next day and says, let me be in it, who ends up being the same guy who gets you some I get that gets nominated for the Oscar that does that. You could be, you could make 13th and, you know, it sits on the back channels of Netflix and doesn't really get seen or move, but it moved. You can, you can make when they see us, you know, and not change the lives of the five men. It doesn't completely revolutionize who they are as human beings and they live differently than they did when it first came out because no one saw it and it didn't make a difference. But that did. And so, you know, there's only so far that the work can get you and that's far. Like I believe I would have gotten far from just sheer hard labor, but there's been a furthering beyond that, that has been blessings that have come into my life that are beyond my control. And some people call that luck. I'll take it.
SPEAKER_03: I think that's it. Thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And as always, it's totally free. This episode was produced by Rachel Faulkner with music composed by Ramtin Ereblui. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Liz Metzger. Our production staff also includes J.C. Howard, Casey Herman, Kerry Thompson, Alex Chung, Elaine Coates, John Isabella, Chris Messini, Carla Estevez, Sam Paulson, and Ramell Wood. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to How I Built This. Hey, it's Guy here. And while we're on a little break, I want to tell you about a recent episode of How I Built This Lab that we released. It's about the company TerraCycle and how they're working to make recycling and waste reduction more accessible. The founder, Tom Zaki, originally launched TerraCycle as a worm poop fertilizer company. He did this from his college dorm room. Basically, the worms would eat trash and then they would turn it into plant fertilizer. Now, his company has since pivoted from that and they recycle everything from shampoo bottles and makeup containers to snack wrappers and even cigarette butts. And in the episode, you'll hear Tom talk about his new initiative to develop packaging that is actually reusable in hopes of phasing out single-use products entirely and making recycling and TerraCycle obsolete. You can hear this episode by following How I Built This and scrolling back a little bit to the episode, Making Garbage Useful with Tom Zaki of TerraCycle, or by searching TerraCycle, that's T-E-R-R-A-C-Y-C-L-E, wherever you listen to podcasts.
